Monument to soldiers who died liberating Ukraine from Nazis toppled (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

The ‘Soviet Soldier’ – a monument commemorating the collective sacrifice of the Soviet army against Nazi forces – has been toppled in western Ukraine. This follows the country-wide fall of some two dozen Lenin statues.

The taking down of the ‘Soviet Soldier’ in the town of
Stryi, Lvov region, turns a new page in the chaos that gripped
the nation in November, and has taken on dangerously nationalist
overtones in the past fortnight.

The city administration’s website first reported on the story of
the monument, erected in 1965 as a companion piece to two other
objects: an obelisk with WWII engravings and the Eternal Flame
over the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

No official confirmation of any orders for its removal has been
given.

The incident follows the dismantling of some 25 statues of
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 revolution that paved way
to the creation of the USSR.

One of the latest in a string of such incidents, in
Dnepropetrovsk, saw people using ropes and a saw, before jumping
onto the statue – the way people did in Iraq when Saddam Hussein
lost power. The writing on the monument was then taken apart
letter by letter, which the rioters kept as souvenirs.

As the fallen statues were being counted, on Sunday the Ukrainian
Rada decided to strip Russian of its status in the Ukraine; a
fate that will befall other regional languages as well. With
Russian, however, the figures are quite clear: the latest census
of 2001 showed that nearly 30 percent of Ukraine considers
Russian to be its mother tongue – nearly 15 percent of them are
Ukrainians.

Although the language has never had official status, it was given
regional status in 2012 in the south-east of the country.

The repealed law on regional language usage was President
Yanukovich’s campaigning ace, as he sought to combat the notion
created by former President Viktor Yushchenko – that Ukrainian
should dominate over all areas and spheres of life.

"Everything that is happening today is, to a greater degree,
about vandalism, bandits and a coup d'etat," Yanukovich
said. The president went on to dub the events as the country’s
worst political crisis in modern history and compared it to the
rise of the Nazi ideology in the 1930s.

"We now see the same things that were [happening] in the
1930s, when the Nazis came to power. [They] forbade [political]
parties...It's the same now – [they] ban the party, stalk, beat
people, burn down offices," he said.

Although Kiev’s Independence Square, and the country as a whole,
could be seen containing a number of different groups and
opinions at the start of the mass riots, the so-called Right
Sector has by many accounts begun to play a more prominent role
in the uprising. Reports from the ground indicate that this
segment of the opposition is a loose conglomeration made up of
the remnants of post-war Nazi-collaborators – the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists, as well as various football hooligans and
smaller nationalist gangs.